


you’re calling to me (i can’t hear what you’ve said)

by maplemood



Category: The Punisher (TV 2017)
Genre: Cross-Generational Friendship, Gen, Post-Season/Series 01
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-19
Updated: 2019-01-19
Packaged: 2019-10-10 10:51:52
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 935
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17424494
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/maplemood/pseuds/maplemood
Summary: “Are you coming back?”He never answers.





	you’re calling to me (i can’t hear what you’ve said)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Sholio](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sholio/gifts).



> Some Frank & Leo friendship for Fandom Stocking! Hopefully this won't get too badly jossed by s2, but either way, I hope you enjoy it. :)

They barely hear from Frank, wherever he is, except on the nights Leo wakes to a knock on her bedroom door. When she opens it, either Mom or Dad will be standing there with the burner cell in their hand.

“Frank’s on the phone, sweetie.”

“Hey, bunny, it’s Frank. You want to say hello?”

“Sure,” Leo says every time, because it’s  _ Frank _ (or Pete or whatever he’s calling himself now—she’s not picky). Then she takes the phone and closes her door and sits on her bed in the dark for a while, talking.

Static sometimes crackles in her ears. The connection isn’t usually too great; it’s like he’s calling from the middle of the woods, or the middle of nowhere. “Hey,” Frank says, “how’s it going?”

Leo answers, “It’s going.” The first time she said that, it made him laugh, so they stick with the same opening lines. They’re kind of old at this point, but Frank isn’t always the best at talking. It helps get him started. 

“How’s school?” he’ll ask next; Leo tells him about her pre-algebra assignments or the diorama she’s putting together for history class, or she reads him the argumentative essay that got her an A: “It would have been an A+, except I goofed up on my citations.”

“You got them figured out now?”

“Uh-huh. MLA’s actually really easy. It’s just parentheses instead of footnotes—sometimes I forget.”

“Yeah, well, next time you stick to those books, all right?”

“You know I do.” She’s not like Zach, even though Zach’s been doing much better in school since Dad came back. Things have been better—a lot better—since Dad came back. 

“Yeah, yeah kid.” His voice sounds like someone rubbed it up against a grater. “I’m just teasing.”

Most things.

Frank doesn’t tell her what’s going on with him. Leo doesn’t ask. The first time he called she did, just really generally: had he been to the store lately and was he camping out and if he was was he warm enough, and she found out that those questions were a good way to shut Frank down. “Leo, you let me worry about those things,” he said, and just like that, discussion over.

Which makes her wonder if he’s back to killing people. This is Frank, and that’s always a possibility, even though Leo hates thinking about it. She hates picturing him bruised and swollen, slapping a pack of frozen peas over his blacked eye or digging a bullet out of his side in some grungy bathroom. Leo hates imagining Frank with a gun in his hand, blowing out the back of someone’s skull or smashing their nose flat with the butt. Even if they deserve it, she hates it. 

“How’s your brother?” he always asks.

“Zach misses you.” 

She knows Frank asks Zach the same thing: “How’s your sister?” She wonders what Zach answers. Leo sits in the dark with her legs crossed, picking a loose thread on her quilt with one hand, and sometimes she wants Frank here, sitting in the goofy pink desk chair with the squeaky wheels that she got for her last birthday, so badly her eyes blur and her throat prickles. 

If he tried sitting on that chair, it would creak like crazy. It might even break. She’d tell him, “Hey—I wanted a new one anyway.”

Leo asks, “When are you coming back?”

Sometimes Frank says, “When I’m finished here,” but all edgy and gruff, like he’s just saying that to shut her up and he wishes she’d quit asking. Other times, he pauses, then says, “I don’t know.”

Leo wishes he could have stayed around, stayed Pete. Would that have been so hard? “Are you coming back?”

Every time, she’ll hear his breath rasping in her ear, hear him sigh. But he never answers.

Sometimes, Leo really hates Frank. 

“Hey,” he’ll say once they’ve both had enough of each other, “I’ve got to go, okay?”

She’s tried not answering, just sighing like he does. Leo can’t. She’s been reading up, online and at the library; she knows lots more about things like PTSD and survivor’s guilt than she used to, and also, she knows Frank. Not as well as she knew Pete, but she knows that the things he does are things he has to do. He’s a good guy; he wouldn’t do them otherwise. “Okay,” she says. “Sleep well.”

“You too, sweetheart.” And Frank hangs up.

_ You should have come in when Dad asked you, _ Leo’s thought about saying. She imagines Frank sitting at their table, at the place she set for him, chewing on turkey or mashed potatoes or cranberry jello. It hurts almost as much as imagining him all alone in a dark motel room.  _ If you’d stayed with us, everything would have been different.  _

But she’s not sure about that, not anymore. After Frank hangs up, Leo always squeezes the phone in her hand. She remembers how scared she was the day those men took Mom and Zach, scared out of her mind, shivering out in the cold. And her phone buzzed, and it was him: “You wait for me. I will come for you.”

He didn’t. He sent Dad instead. Leo’s got absolutely no reason to be mad about that, and she isn’t, she really isn’t, she loves Dad, and seeing him when he was supposed to be dead, she still can’t describe how that felt, but—

“I love you,” Leo says, in the dark, to the switched-off phone. Then she gets up, and opens her bedroom door, and goes to find Mom and Dad. 

**Author's Note:**

> Title swiped from "Time After Time" by Cyndi Lauper, though I also listened to [this](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m8t319IOYT8) cover by Vázquez Sounds while I was writing.


End file.
